All right, it’s still early days, but here’s more about Omicron. And a bit of okay news at the end.
🦠 Omicron
I’ve not wanted to dive into this too quickly because researchers haven’t had much time to parse things out, buuut… it’s now been a couple of weeks, and an image is emerging.
1. It’s everywhere 🌍
We should be thanking South Africa for identifying it, but closing borders is the public health equivalent of fixing a dam’s breach with Play-Doh. In France, Omicron already represented 6.7% of the samples sequenced. In Denmark:
2. By now it’s obvious — it is absurdly transmissible 😷
Early studies are showing that whilst Delta’s reproduction rate (how many people is the average sick person infecting) is hovering around 1, Omicron’s is at nearly 4 in South Africa and at 6 in the U.K.:
This translates into a doubling of cases every two to three days.
3. Immunity evasion 🦹
That was the first thing about Omicron that freaked everyone out. There are 32 mutations on the spike protein alone, which is where antibodies attach to stop the virus from even entering your cells.
Functional mutations would allow the virus to evade antibodies from vaccines and previous infections, or make the virus “stickier,” i.e., better at entering your cells. In the following list, those functional mutations — known or never seen before — appear in yellow, red, and all the shades of purple:
4. Is it mild?
Earlier this week, all the chatter revolved around the severity of the variant. The world appeared to sigh with relief when Omicron was deemed not so bad.
Side note: even at first, the experts who expressed the most concern weren’t particularly focused on that aspect of Omicron because on its own, high transmissibility = high alert. A virus that infects more quickly is a virus that gives itself many more chances of evolving. Let’s not assume that a virus always evolves to be less severe.
In truth, we just didn’t have clarity on that at all. The variant has only been on our radars for two weeks, and we’ve all learnt that there is a delay between the identification of cases and increased hospitalisations and deaths. There were plenty of reasons to feel optimistic, though. Previous infections and vaccines do provide protection that might lower our susceptibility to it, but this doesn’t mean the variant is actually mild on “naïve” populations (I love that experts refer to people who’ve never been exposed to a pathogen as “naïve”).
Now, though, please join me in hearing the rumble:
And Bloomberg reports that as Omicron took hold, excess deaths in South Africa nearly doubled the week of November 28 compared with the week before, even as reports on hospitalisations indicated that the variant may be milder. As we know, excess deaths is often considered a more precise measure than official Covid deaths to assess the state of the pandemic in a given location.
How to use this: if we’ve learnt anything in this pandemic, it is never to be complacent. Vaccines (boosters) are the absolute minimum, but do not let up on other safety measures, top of which is staying aware of the quality of the air you are steeped in (masks, ventilation, ventilation, ventilation). Outdoors, keep your distance from others. We beat this together or not at all.
🎊+🤨 Moderna’s mRNA vaccine against the flu
Today Moderna released its Phase 1 results on the mRNA flu vaccine they’ve been developing. The good news is that it appears effective against all four strains of the flu. The not-so-great news is that the antibody levels it causes are equivalent to Sanofi’s existing enhanced vaccine Fluzone HD (for this reason, Moderna’s stock took a 10% tumble).
We should note is that it is notoriously difficult to measure actual immunity based on antibody levels alone (for a refresher, click on my last summary about variants and scroll down to “the good news,” bullet point #2).
How to use this: we should be waiting for Phase 2 results, but it’s comforting to see that an mRNA vaccine can be effective against all versions of the flu.